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The YCTABBIC Awards

Updated Jan. 15, 1999 12:01 a.m. ET

W hen a 1997 National Book Award went to a biography of Jefferson instead of Sam Tanenhaus's book on Whittaker Chambers, Don Imus didn't just complain about it. He used his radio show to announce his own Imus American Book Awards, whose first prize of $100,000 is 10 times that of the award that had ticked him off. And Imus is not alone. On TV there is Oprah's book club. Indeed, everyone from the Pulitzer committee to People magazine now has a list.

Our own belief is that people are fully capable of deciding for themselves. Contrary to what Miss Merriweather probably told you in the third grade, in real life you can tell a great deal about a book even before you have read it. An opus on world hunger from the Worldwatch Institute's Lester Brown, for example, will not ordinarily be attended by a plug in National Review or a blurb from Milton Friedman -- and with good reason. A Danielle Steel cover will never leave people confusing her with Doris Kearns Goodwin. Even a hostile review -- Molly Ivins on P.J. O'Rourke -- may help rather than hurt sales. With this in mind, and after sifting through the most popular offerings for 1998, we hereby announce The Wall Street Journal's first annual YCTABBIC: You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover(age) Awards, followed by an excerpt from a review that should sum up the book for friends and foes alike.

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1st prize

The Joan Didion Award for The Beat Goes On

"So abundant, even prodigal, is Toni Morrison's first new novel since her Nobel Prize, so symphonic, light-struck and sheer, as if each page had been rubbed transparent, and so much the splendid sister of "Beloved" -- she has even gone back to Brazil, not this time to see the three-spoke slave collar and the iron mouth-bit but to check out candomble -- that I realize I've been holding my breath since December 1993. After such levitation, weren't all of us in for a fall? Who knew she'd use the prize as a kite instead of a wheelbarrow? . . .

"[I]ts rainbow parabola also includes Reconstruction and Trails of Tears, Vietnam and civil rights, patriarchy and ancestor worship, abduction and sanctuary, migration and abandonment, sex and ghosts. Considering degrees of blackness, it will raise a ruckus and rewrite God." (John Leonard in The Nation)

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2nd prize

The Barbra Streisand Award for Really Deep Thoughts

"George Soros, to be clear about this from the outset, is a great and a good man -- perhaps the most successful financial-market investor in history, and one of the most generous philanthropists of this or any age. His tragedy is that these remarkable distinctions do not satisfy him. He craves recognition as a great thinker. Because of who he is, there will always be buyers for his books, publishers for his books, and cash-strapped academics to say flattering things about his books. None of this alters the fact that his books are no good." (The Economist)

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Honorable Mention

The Nina Burleigh Award for Objectivity, Properly Understood

"If you see the Independent Counsel as a puritanical zealot out to topple the president and the House impeachment inquiry as a primarily political enterprise that goes against our constitutional grain, if you believe that Clinton should have settled the Paula Jones lawsuit and never subjected himself to a deposition, and if you tend to cheer on Democratic pundits who defend the president on MSNBC and other all-Lewinsky-all-the-time cable channels, 'Sexual McCarthyism' should prove an absorbing account of our salacious and seemingly never-ending national saga." (Matthew Dallek in the Washington Post).

Tony & Tacky

No Bull: While sports sections around the country today speculate whether the National Basketball Association will survive without Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls guard put basketball second. At the press conference announcing his retirement from the sport -- again -- Mr. Jordan began by offering his condolences to the family of slain police officer John Knight, who was being buried that same day. "I think this puts a lot of things in perspective," said the 35-year-old star. Indeed.